[Olympus] Author list format

[Douglas Kenneth Hasell]

Dear Colleagues,

	During yesterday's collaboration meeting there was significant discussion on the choice for the author list for the OLYMPUS NIM paper.  Basically we are free to sort the authors and institutions as we like.  With this E-mail I want to go over the main arguments for the author list, show some examples, and then collect your preferences in a Doodle Poll.

	The author list has two basic formats: listing by institute or by author.

	Listing by institute has the authors grouped according to their institute affiliation and the institutes arranged in some order.  See the attached file Institutes.pdf.  This format makes it easy to find the people at each institute involved with the experiment.  However, it also takes up a lot of space (two pages in our case).  The order of the institutes is alphabetical according to Arizona, Bonn, DESY, Glasgow, Hampton, INFN Bari, INFN Ferrara, INFN Rome, Mainz, MIT, PNPI, UNH, and Yerevan.  Note the order of institutes is arbitrary and can be changed.

	Listing by authors has all the authors, in some order, with superscripts relating each author to their respective institution.  The institutes are listed below the authors.  See the attached file Authors.pdf.  This format is more compact (fits on one page) but makes it hard to see which people from each institute were involved.  In this example the authors are listed alphabetically.

	A paper is general cited or referenced by the first author's name.  In the above cases Alarcon et al. or Akopov et al.

	Since the order of authors or institutes is arbitrary other orderings can be considered.  Often the author list has the authors or institues in order of their contribution to the paper: principal authors/institutes coming first with contributing authors following.  See the file Principals.pdf. This acknowledges the contribution of the principal authors/institutes and the paper is then cited accordingly Milner et al.

	When there are only a few authors on a paper it is easy to rank their contributions and list them accordingly.  For very large collaborations it is more difficult and an alphabetical sorting is often used.  The OLYMPUS collaboration is somewhere between these two cases.

	In future physics papers the main analysis effort and most of the writing of the paper will be done by a small number of people, often one or two graduate students.  In this case it is beneficial to list their names first to recognise and acknowledge their work. 

	In yesterday's discussion several people argued for the Institutes.pdf format.  Others preferred the Authors.pdf format.  Still others preferred  Principals.pdf to acknowledge the original proponents of OLYMPUS.

	To resolve this issue I have created a Doodle poll.  You can make 3 choices for each option: YES to indicate support, (YES) for less support, and NO.  You can select YES for all three, or two.  Similarly with (YES) and NO.  The Doodle poll is at:

http://www.doodle.com/6af6h7apg3sc6ian

Please indicate your preference by the Friday, 25 October. 

                                                    Cheers,
                                                            Douglas

26-415 M.I.T.                                 Tel: +1 (617) 258-7199
77 Massachusetts Avenue                       Fax: +1 (617) 258-5440
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA                      E-mail: hasell at mit.edu           

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